Apple may have just made a key acquisition that could help the company create a truly revolutionary augmented reality headset. According to a new report, German eye-tracking company SensoMotoric Instruments has been purchased by an Apple shell company, giving the iPhone-maker access the company’s trove of patents related to eye-tracking glasses and other systems.
Apple has acquired acquired a sleep-tracking app called Beddit, suggesting that tracking users’ hours of shut-eye could be incorporated into a future Apple Watch or iPhone.
Financial terms of the acquisition haven’t been disclosed, although the buyout is confirmed by Beddit in the small print on its webpage.
Apple has completed a deal to acquire Workflow, the popular utility app for iPhone and iPad.
It’s unclear exactly how much the Cupertino company paid, though it was reportedly “a solid payday” for the team behind the app, which includes former iPhone jailbreaker Ari Weinstein.
When you go to theaters to see the latest Star Wars movie, the special effects — particularly the faces of aliens — will now be driven by Apple technology. That’s because Apple has purchased Faceshift, a Zurich-based company that has created cool tech to capture a person’s facial expressions in real time.
Rightly or wrongly, iCloud is one of Apple’s most regularly criticized products (speaking personally, I’ve never had any major problems with it, but I use Google’s rival service far more.) It seems that Apple is more than aware of the negative feedback, however, because it’s in the process of improving the back-end infrastructure needed to support its cloud-based services.
Firstly, the company bought FoundationDB, a Virginia-based startup, which specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. Now a separate report claims that Apple acquired U.K.-based big data analytics firm Acunu sometime in late 2013, with the likely effort of using its database technology for providing analytics related to iCloud services.
It was recently reported that Apple was buying Swell, an iPhone app that took a Pandora approach to playing podcasts. The acquisition was said to cost around $30 million, and the app has since been taken off the App Store.
Now Apple has confirmed the buy, which bodes well for its own Podcasts app.
Apple has acquired Matcha, a second-screen video search and recommendation service that was recently closed, for a fee believed to be between $1 million and $1.5 million.
Matcha was previously available as an iOS app, and it allowed users to get an overview of everything they could watch on a variety of cable TV networks and video-streaming services. But the service was closed back in May as it focused on a new direction — one which will now be controlled by Apple.
Apple has acquired Locationary, a small Canadian startup that crowdsources location data, according to a report from AllThingsD. Apple has refused to comment on its plans for the company, but the acquisition will undoubtedly help improve Apple’s widely criticized Maps service.
Speculation that Apple may be preparing to build its own mapping application gained strength Wednesday on a report the Cupertino, Calif. company acquired a Canadian online mapping developer. If true, the report could be the latest skirmish between the iPhone maker and Internet giant Google.
French-Canadian news site cyberpresse.ca wrote Wednesday Apple purchased Quebec-based Poly9 and moved employees to Cupertino, Calif. The company’s website is also offline, as well as Poly9’s chief product, Poly9 Globe. The product, which operates in a web browser, lets users find their location on a 3D globe. Websites, including Skype.com reportedly offer the service.
Although there is no official comment by Apple, the Canadian report said Poly9 was “recently” acquired and it Quebec headquarters closed. The company’s customers include Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, MSNBC and NORAD.
The purchase could be the next step in Apple developing its own mapping application for the iPhone and iPad. In 2009, Apple acquired Placebase, a Google Maps rival, as well as advertising for someone to take iPhone’s Maps “to the next level.”
[AppleInsider]
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Inc., a company founded by former Apple employees who worked on Workflow, the software Apple acquired in 2017 and renamed “Shortcuts.”
At Software Applications, the team has been hard at work on Sky, an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions across any app on your Mac. The acquisition should give OpenAI a leg up when it comes to integrating ChatGPT into Macs.